


The Angel's Return

by nanianela (orphan_account)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angels Are Weird, Five Years Later, Inspired by Dreams, M/M, Melancholy, One Shot, Sad Castiel, Sad Ending, Short One Shot, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-28
Updated: 2018-09-28
Packaged: 2019-07-18 13:40:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16119614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/nanianela
Summary: I had a very vivid dream of Castiel returning to a settled-down Dean years later to express his regrets. I haven't written this pairing in so long, so I wanted to capture the dream in a short oneshot :)





	The Angel's Return

**Author's Note:**

> This is divided in two: what I was thinking about before I truly fell asleep, and what happened in the dream. I've added a few extra details into the dream, but most of it is very accurate to what happened.

**Pre-Dream**

They'd made love once before. Well, Dean hated it when he used that term for it. We've fucked, he would have said instead. If you caught him in a more lighthearted mood, maybe he'd say screwed, nailed, banged, dozens of other variations. Actually, when Castiel thought more about it, he only used those terms for other sexual situations, not theirs. Sure, we fucked once, he would have said, curt, in a there-will-be-no-follow-up-questions tone. Well, Castiel figured that's what he would say, if he did eventually end up talking about it. As far as the angel knew, he hadn't told anyone.

Castiel had been at a new low when it happened. The palm of his hand was torn open from rose thorns, and his wrist was sprained. He was so used to healing himself, he was not used to pain like this for longer than a few minutes. He thought that maybe a woman liked him and wanted to take him on a date, something humans were meant to do, something they did every day. He kind of liked her, too. But he had shown up only to be stuck as the babysitter, rejected, and then attacked. 

But Dean was _there_. For him. To patch him up, to give him advice before he stepped up to the front door for his date. Telling him to unbutton his shirt, to show a little skin. To ditch the vest. Stalling. Admiring. Was it really Dean that wanted that date with him?

They'd rented a motel room together. Dean had made sure to put the wrist into an expertly made splint first and foremost, before anything else started. It was very much on brand with him. They'd kissed. Stripped. Left the ceiling light off, but had a lamp on. 

Dean had been stretching himself out on dildos, he had been doing it for years, saying some cheeky comment about how God put the G-spot up the male ass, so he was just doing what his body and Mother Nature intended. He knew how to stretch himself, prep, and Castiel slid inside him easily. Castiel laid on his back, as Dean boxed him in with his body, elbows propped around him, and rode. All they looked at was the other's face.

Castiel lost his virginity that night, but it seemed like the sex had passed so quickly that Castiel was surprised that he could now strip himself of a long-time title he'd held. His eyes had watered afterwards, but he didn't think he'd call it _cry_. His face hadn't contorted or his chest hadn't jumped with choppy breaths. They'd just watered like that, on their own.

The next morning he dressed in his uniform for work, with that stupid little blue vest, and Dean had dropped him off. They didn't speak of it that morning.

When they finally brought it up, it was years later, close to three. 

 _It was purely sexual. Cas._  That was Dean's argument-ending line. _You know I'm horny, like, all the time. You were human, and humans... look, what I'm saying is you were probably feeling pretty randy too. It happened, things like this happen. It was just sex. Understand?_

This ending wasn't the direction Castiel thought the argument would go when it started. He'd been the one to bring it up in the first place. _I know you tend to express your love physically_ , he'd started. _I know it's hard for you to put things like this into words. We made love instead of talking about it, because that's what you know how to do. But I'm not afraid to say it. I love you, Dean. And from what I've seen, you feel the same way. Don't you?_

**Dream**

Dean had just finished drilling a new hole for their lock in the door with a battery-powered drill. He and his wife lived in a two-story wooden house on a street with lots of room to breathe, with a big front garden and yellowish-tan wild grasses swaying on both sides. Lots of room between neighbors, dips and rolling hills, but you still had a visual of other homes. Plenty of room for the kids to ride their bikes around, Dean would describe it. A cute fence surrounding it and a big gate with an archway of vines. 

"Honeyyy, are you done?" His wife's voice called from somewhere in the house, lightly tinged with a Jersey girl accent. 

"Yep!" He'd called back. "Just gotta test it out!" 

He pulled on the metal pin on a string, a circle head with a long metal stick about four inches long. Out in the middle of nowhere like this, a handmade lock like this would do just fine to keep out anything they needed to keep out, like a bird or raccoon. No need to worry about human thieves or robberies all the way out here.

Crap, he'd drilled the hole just a little too far away. "Stupid..." He muttered under his breath, he was pulling so hard on the string attached to the lock's pin that he was starting to warp the screen. "Come on-" 

He looked up to see a figure of a man in a tan trench coat and tie very suddenly, standing among a bush of flowers to the right of the front gate.

Dean had gasped deeply.

"You scared the Bejesus out of me!" He called out to the figure.

Castiel didn't look a day older than he'd always looked, clearly an adult but not any specific age. Comfortably 30's. He'd just appeared there out of thin air, Dean had not seen him walk up, but something about the way his eye drew to him the exact moment he'd appeared was eerie. Clearly, he'd teleported there, but now he was standing stock still, posture ramrod straight, like a garden statue, like he'd existed firmly in that spot for years. A mess of contradictions between eye and mind that had him reeling. Dean couldn't believe he used to be used to this. Without seeing it for so long, he now realized why angels' standard greeting was _Do not be afraid_. It was unnatural in a way that made his instincts light up. 

"Dean."

He was just like Dean had remembered he'd looked like. He'd almost forgotten his face, couldn't summon it in his mind anymore, but it all came flooding back. His beautiful, straight nose. Those blue eyes, of course. It burned to look at them. The worried expression and squinty eyes. Such a beautiful man. 

He'd teleported- _flown_ \- once again, and now he was on the porch to Dean's right, sitting on top of their big coil of garden hose that needed to be that long so they could water the backyard with it too and not have two hoses installed. The sight of it had been jarring once again. Dean's eyes didn't accept the abruptness of it, so Dean's mind supplied the sensation that the angel was like a magazine cut out, just a 2D image placed over another image of his porch. He used to do that when he was younger, because it was the only kind of doll he could get away with playing with in front of his Dad. A picture of himself, placed over something in a magazine. Standing with a cool car, in a nice room, in a beautiful place for rich people, not his family that was scraping by. _Pinching pennies_ , his dad's term for it.

Even though his mind knew, his eyes flicked over to the garden gate again as if they expected two men now, one sitting on the hose and the other still in the garden. Such an inhuman way to get around. 

"You said it was only sexual, but-" The angel was crying. Dean had never seen him like this, but he wasn't surprised that he was still just as beautiful in the act. The tip of his perfect nose grew rosy. The tears streamed down his pale cheeks, and the pinkness in his eyes only further brought out the brilliance of their blue, they were like pools you could swim in. Bright blue motel pool water, so chlorinated you could smell it when you parked. 

"I have a wife now." Dean told him. "A family, a home out here." 

"I know." Castiel replied, all those tears streaming from his eyes, and not just one. Three, four droplets streaked side-by-side down his cheeks, all different lengths. Dean had never seen it look like that before on someone and still be so beautiful. "I know you said it was only sex. But... five years is a long time. And the way I feel..." 

"Yeah, it is a long time." Dean replied once he'd trailed off, hating that he didn't know what to say to him, this beautiful man who had popped so unexpectedly back into his life. "Cas-"

"Daaaad! C'mere! Look what I just found!" He was interrupted by a call up from the second story, from the boy's room. Even though he wouldn't be able to see his son, Dean was still drawn to look into the house where the noise was coming from. 

Dean turned his head back to look at his porch, but the angel had disappeared.

Not knowing what else to do, he just climbed the carpeted stairwell to answer his son's call. 

"Check it out!" One of his two boys pointed it out, the older one, around twelve. The younger boy, seven or eight, lounged around lazily in his bed, flying a toy rocket through the air in the light of his loft window. 

It was the biggest lava lamp Dean had ever seen, built with thick glass and filled with a purple fluid, a pinkish wax congregated all along the bottom half and base. The widest part of it must have been the width of a basketball rim, it looked like it weighed fifty pounds. 

"Oh, man!" Dean said, laying on his enthusiasm a little too thick, maybe overcompensating because of the strange, hollow feeling left in his chest from the angel's brief visit. "Way cool! I used to have one of these when I was a kid, too. It broke, but- it looks like you'd have a way harder time breaking this thing."

"Pretty cool, huh?" The kid beamed at his dad's praise. Still, kids could be a lot more intuitive than you'd think. He'd picked up that something was weird in his dad's mood, just a hunch of a feeling. But he'd forgotten about it mere minutes later, distracted by something else. 

 _I guess I was thinking he'd cry like that when he hears about me and Sam dying_ , Dean thought. _I want him to look just like that when he finds out._ Then he realized that thought was pretty messed up. 

Dean sensed the angel's presence once more, sure he was on the staircase behind him, but when he turned around he was met with nothing. 

**Author's Note:**

> Dean's sons weren't biologically his but were his wife's kids. I hope I captured how strange the teleportation felt: in the dream it was so strange and uncanny.


End file.
